Interview: Jefequeso, developer of Fingerbones and The Moon Sliver

Although Jefequeso has been in the game development scene for over a decade, 2014 has seen his work explode into popularity. His horror game Fingerbones has been let's played by notable Youtubers like Markiplier and CinnamonToastKen, while his latest release—a narrative driven game titled The Moon Sliver—was Greenlit to Steam.

I had the opportunity to talk to Jefequeso about the meaning behind his online moniker, his unique design choices, and his advice for new programmers. If you would like to listen to the interview in its entirety, check out the Youtube video below. Otherwise, feel free to read the transcribed highlights.

In general, your games seem to have progressed from gameplay-focused to story-focused: you've moved from Pit: The Bite-Sized Shooter and Down We Go, which are both retro shooters, to Fingerbones and The Moon Sliver. Has this been a conscious decision?

Chunky Monkey Ice Cream: dangerous enemy in Down We Go.

Kind of. During the development of Down We Go, I got really interested in "How do you tell a story through an interactive medium?" Originally I was—well, like you said, very gameplay focused. I love first person shooters and I wanted to make first person shooters. But gradually, over time, as I was writing reviews of games and articles about games, I just starting thinking a lot more about telling stories. So then, when I decided to switch over to Unity, I was like, well, maybe I'll try making my own story focused game. Because, you know, that lets me learn the engine and the basis of how Unity works without really having to do anything mechanically intensive. So that led to Fingerbones, and Fingerbones led to The Moon Sliver.



Both Fingerbones and The Moon Sliver eschew traditional jump scares. Yet Fingerbones is definitely a horror game, and The Moon Sliver possesses elements of horror. Why did you avoid the genre staple?   

Well...primarily because I don't like jump scares. I really like horror games, but I don't enjoy that jolting rush of adrenaline that a lot of other people do seem to enjoy.  I don't actually get any enjoyment out of that. To me, that's very unpleasant and not really interesting in any way.  

In AAA horror games and a lot of indie horror games, the focus is on being a vehicle for jump scares—kind of being a vehicle for let's players to react to them. I don't really enjoy that so much, so I wanted to do something that was a little more creepy, more psychological, a little more gets under your skin.



Let's talk about The Moon Sliver. From a design standpoint, it is very unique. Because there are no set sequences and no required actions for opening the mountain path—the path that takes the game to its end—players can do whatever they want until the mountain opens at nightfall. How did you account for varying player experiences when trying to craft a cohesive narrative?

A note in The Moon Sliver.

The whole storytelling of The Moon Sliver is based around it being really fragmented, so I tried to make sure the different buildings you visit each contain a little part that makes sense on its own and doesn't necessarily need to be found right after another part. The whole exterior part, all the different dwellings you go to—the chapel, all of those places—they were designed to work in different ways, in a different order depending on where people decided to go first or what they happened to find first. It's more like a collage of things that gets put together and kind of ends up making more sense at the end, when you go under the mountain.




Another unique design choice in The Moon Sliver is the exclusion of fail states.  Why did you decide to make the game in this manner?

The beautiful, though ominous, setting for Fingerbones.

Well, the thing about Fingerbones and The Moon Sliver is that I never specifically set out to make what I guess you could call an 'anti-game:' you know, a game lacking fail states. Some people would not even consider it to be a video game. I didn't really set out to do that, it's just that both of them kind of ended up that way as I worked through them and tried to think of how I could tell the story in the best way and what would work the best and what the game was. I don't know; it just kind of turned out that way.



What's interesting is that prior to working on Fingerbones and The Moon Sliver, I was actually very vehemently against the idea of creating a game that did away with traditional challenge and traditional fail-states and stuff like that. And then I ended up making games that did that exact thing.

At least in the case of The Moon Sliver, one of the reasons I never ended up including any sort of fail state in there is because in horror, especially, death—any sort of death—is a release of tension.  It also kind of sets the bar.  In The Moon Sliver, if you ended up dying in the first half hour by encountering a monster or something like that, then that's the bar for what's going to be scary afterward.  Dying by that monster, I mean. 

A (non lethal) telephone pole from The Moon Sliver.

Whereas the way I did do it, I didn't want to ever have that point reached, where death is the only thing that's going to scare you from now on.  I also wanted it to be a very gradual building up of tension and fright and creepiness until the very end and not have that interrupted by "Oh, I died" and "I know where that thing is, now I have to do it again" and now all the tension is gone. 

I have one last question.  What advice would you give to someone who is starting out as an indie developer?

This is the advice I always give to people who are just starting out in game design in general or who are starting out with programming: every project will take longer than you think it will even if you factor in the fact that every project will take longer than you think it will. Every project will be bigger than you think it will be. I've been programming for a long time, probably twelve years now.  I started when I was in elementary school and I still never successfully estimate how long or how big a project is going to be.

Jefequeso's first game.

And then, I guess the other bit of advice that I've found—I mean, I'm still on the mid to low tier of indie development. I'm not raking in thousands of dollars on each game I produce and there aren't a lot of people who know about me.  But I've gotten significantly more exposure after releasing Fingerbones and The Moon Sliver this past year than I ever did in the previous decade.  



The reason for that is because with Fingerbones, especially, I really pushed it. I didn't just send it off to a few publications or just put it on one site and expect that somehow it would take off in popularity.  I spent a long time emailing different people and thinking up ways I could promote it and stuff. And one of the primary ways I found that was really successful, that really made Fingerbones actually, you know, a game that people played rather than something five people played and then forgot about, was that I got it—and this isn't necesarily because I did anything right—it ended up getting into the let's play circuit. Yamimash played it, and then raedwulfGamer played it...and then Markiplier played it, and that was really the watershed moment. When Markiplier plays something, then everyone else is seeing that. I still sometimes go on Youtube and do a search and there will be a brand new let's play of Fingerbones. It'll be somebody with ten subscribers and it'll have gotten one view, but still: I got it into that let's play circuit somehow and that's how it took off.

I would suggest that even though Fingerbones and The Moon Sliver are both very narrative focused games and you could argue that anyone who watches a let's play is spoiling the game for themselves and they're not actually going to go play it for themselves, it's like if you're just starting off and no one knows about you, then you try and get your game to a let's player. Try to get any Youtuber to play it, because that's free exposure. It's free advertisement, and that is a very valuable thing.

If you are interested in buying Jefequeso's games, they are available for purchase here.  The Moon Sliver is also available on Steam.  Jefequeso also runs a blog, tweets on Twitter, and puts game trailers onto Youtube.  

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